Not So Fast, 2, 3 & 4. Bias

I fear for our society.

Last week, a young man in A Coruña was beaten to death. He was with a friend who was holding a video call with someone else, outside a recently opened night club and music bars. A brute and his girlfriend, thinking she was filming them, got belligerent and started shouting to her to stop filming them. The young man, Samuel, tried to explain it was merely a video call. The brute simply replied, "o paras de grabar, o te mato, maricón de mierda,"  (either you stop filming or I kill you, fucking fagot) and started punching Samuel. 

After having the fight broken up by a passer-by, the brute and his girlfriend left. But, while Samuel was sitting, with lacerations on his face, and his friend helping him look for his phone, which had fallen, the brute returned with twelve friends. They beat Samuel until he was unconscious, calling him, "maricón de mierda."  (fucking fagot) After they had left, the friend, who couldn't do anything to stop them, called an ambulance, but Samuel ended up dying.

There were protests yesterday evening all over Spain, against the homophobic murder (Samuel was gay.). But, in Madrid, when the marchers neared one of the richer neighborhoods, the riot police took batons to them. A few of the marchers then picked up garbage cans and other things, and flung them as well as they could against the police. The police's version? That they reacted to people who were throwing things against them. The truth is that that came after the agression, but the judge will only believe the police version.

A couple of weeks ago, a judge threw out a suit against Rocío Monasterio for document falsification. It seems that before she got her title of architect, she used another architect's stamp on plans for the renovation of a flat in Madrid. The judge's argument was that the falsification was so obvious, that there was no crime, because the obviousness anulled any fraud. That news was followed by memes of people mocking the sentence, with hand-written driver's licenses, and other things. If she is forgiven for such a bad falsification, everyone can be forgiven.

That's not what happened with Isa Serra, ex-representative of Podemos in Madrid's regional government. She was accused by various policemen of assaulting them at a protest against an eviction back in 2014. Despite acknowledging that the police officers' testimony was almost word for word among them, and that still pictures and video didn't show her doing anything of what she was accused, the fact that she was there when others assaulted the police is enough to presume she also participated, and the Supreme Court upheld her sentence of 19 months jail time. 

Bias, much?

Again, during the run-up to the Madrid elections this spring, Vox paid for a large poster to be put up with a picture of an elderly lady looking down on the left, and a picture of a dark-skinned young man in a hoodie and face covering looking menacingly towards the woman, on the right. In the middle, the affirmation that a MENA (unaccompanied minor, usually foreign) cost taxpayers €4,700 a month, and your grandmother's pension €426 a month. It is a false statement. The state took Vox to court over it, alleging it stirred up hatred against a certain group of people with its false statement. The regional court of Madrid handed down its sentence, saying that Vox had a right to put up the poster, despite the misinformation written on it. The judges said that it was simply a campaign slogan, and that ideas can't be forbidden, when others express even worse. They continued, and said that the collective of unaccompanied minors were a "an evident social and political problem" (un evidente problema político y social). No, your honor, you are.

Many of the judges sitting in many Spanish higher courts, are leftovers from Franco, or simply pronounce sentences according to their personal opinion. Most do not know what it is to be impartial. Too many take into account the affinity they have with some of the defendants, and roll with it, instead of taking into account all the evidence, or, even, the law itself. 

There won't be another military takeover in Spain, like in 1936. But there very well might be a judicial putsch. By handing down sentences like these, right-wing judges will allow the extreme right to go ahead and demolish our young democracy. Gradually, one trial after another, precedent will be set judicially. Nothing will be apparently against the law, and the next Caudillo will be crowned by a judge. 

Life continues.